Uh-oh. Somebody better tell Wynton Marsalis, Leontyne Price, Ornette Coleman and the Modern Jazz Quartet (just to name a few) that they’re all traitors to their race.
Let me be blunt. This racist bullshit has to stop—racist because (a) it’s as feverishly anti-white as the Ku Klux Klan is anti-black, and (b) it reduces all black people to their “race”-and-grievances, and purports to represent them all, as if black people were a monolithic bloc as hostile to “white music”—and the “white arts” overall—as the BLM commandos who browbeat Oxford’s music faculty into taking this absurd position.
So learning to play the piano, and conduct orchestras, cause Oxford’s “students of colour great distress”? Really? Who found that out, and how? Was there a petition, or did BLM conduct a poll? And do the “students of colour” majoring in music at Oxford University really have a beef with learning to play the piano? If so, why? It can’t be that they lack the talent, since (it hurts to have to point this out) many “people of colour” have brilliantly mastered the piano, loved, and learned much from, the likes of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, and significantly influenced the course of such “white” music, since the end of slavery in the US—because music ultimately transcends “race” as these “Social Justice” tools conceive it. So if those “students of colour” are in such “great distress” over the curriculum in Oxford’s music department, maybe they should change majors, or transfer to other schools.
How did “progressive” activists “of colour” push us back toward Jim Crow segregation in the arts (and not just there)? There are surely many reasons for this vast and dangerous regression, but paramount among them is the elite’s need to balkanize the rest of us, to keep us at each other’s throats, instead of theirs.
2 replies on “Oxford’s music faculty will scrap their emphasis on “white composers””
As someone with a Master’s in piano from the University of Surrey, I find this story so strange and alarming. It would be fascinating to research black composers in Renaissance Europe, but how many were there? Am I even allowed to ask that? My favorite aspect of studying in England (compared to my first school MSU) is that professors seemed “old school” and not bothered by the canon wars. This is not to say MSU professors were subpar, but I could tell they had to follow the script and at times were mired in a weird agenda. Hopefully, students will learn which are the good professors, and which are careerists. The problem is, even at Oxford I imagine, there’s not much choice of lecturers for the big undergrad classes. Time to start your own college, Professor Miller! And when you do, want to work there!
As a musician it absolutely drives me nuts when people try to force their political/sociological lenses onto music, driving wedges between people in the process. You’re 100% right that music transcends race; it transcends everything. Nothing else on this planet comes close to how it brings people together by speaking directly to the soul, which knows no race/ethnicity/nationality/gender/economic status.
I’m going to hope that article is exaggerating for internet outrage points, but either way it fits an alarming trend in how people are seeing music’s “place” in their ideal society.